Texas, Export Shipping to Mexico

Speaker is from Laredo, TX; he is a 31-year-old white* man with a college education. The interview took place in 1967.

INFORMANT: Say this has entered customs, and, oh, the next step is to prepare a Mexican customs entry. Oh, Mexico [would] call them pedimentos. It’s really an appraisal sheet. It’s, it’s a breakdown of this sheet {showing—

FIELDWORKER: Here} is the same information that {[xx]

INFORMANT: That’s} right, but here you give them all the information. For example, let me see if I’ve got one right here. You give them all the information on, on what the invoice contains—there’s one, one [xx]— what the invoice contains, what, uh, what, what the material—it, so basically here, for example, is some [balding] equipment going over there. And on this appraisal sheet you tell them who it’s for, who made the invoice out of the States,—this came from St. Louis, Missouri—how much the freight was, and on the reverse of this for- of this thing you put the—everything has to be marked. {The word [xx]—

FIELDWORKER: And so the complete identification [xx]

INFORMANT: This identification number is that traffic number I spoke to you a little while ago. Number of boxes, what they contain, the tariff duty, the tariff number, the ad valorem rate, and what the actual duties would be paid. For example, here would be nine hundred ninety-six pesos and seventy-three cents. As you can see this is a form that has already been approved by the appraiser. These appraisers are called vistas. Very different from the vistas we have nowadays, here.

BOTH: [Laughter]

*At the time the Fieldwork was conducted from 1965–70, Americans of Hispanic descent were identified primarily as white. It is possible the speaker may also identify as Latino if interviewed in the 2010s. Please listen to full interview available at the UW Digital Collections site for additional information (Search: TX048).